Re: [Bug-gnubg] 3d board

[Gary Wong]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 09:43:45AM +0000, Jonathan Kinsey wrote:
> I've recently started looking at OpenGL.  I've had a go at drawing a 3d 
> board and you can see a screen shot of my first attempt here:

Wow, impressive!

A year or so ago I started playing around with OpenGL and got as far
as a dice rolling animation (which more or less worked -- the effect
each time a die hit the board wasn't exactly physically viable, but
that could probably be fixed if I learned a bit more mathematics).

The main thing I didn't like about it was that it seemed to lose all
of the quality of the 2D board.  In 2D, there are essentially no
visible artifacts: aliasing is avoided by making sure every pixel is
either supersampled, antialiased some other way, or positioned where
it doesn't matter (e.g. on a smooth gradient or on a "speckled"
surface); lighting calculations are made per-pixel (or subpixel) where
it matters; etc.  My 3D attempt didn't even come close, which was
pretty disappointing: polygonisation artifacts, lighting artifacts,
and aliasing all over the place.  Your example looks much better!

> I know people tend to have a love/hate thing with 2d and 3d boards
> and I'm not sure if there's any interest in a 3d board for gnu BG.
> If there is though I'd be happy to try to get the code I've written
> into a usable state.

If you don't mind the work, I think it would be a nice option to add!
The question raised elsewhere about mapping mouse co-ordinates to
"object clicked on" shouldn't be too hard to address -- if using
z-buffering it's almost trivial, and if not we can still work it out.
If done carefully, most of the gtkboard.c code ought to work for both
2D and 3D cases, as J?rn mentions.

Cheers,
Gary.
-- 
   Gary Wong           address@hidden           http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~gary/